VMware today announced that vCloud Hybrid Service, its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, will become generally available in September. That's no surprise, as we already knew it was slated to go live this quarter.

What is surprising is just how extensive the cloud will be. When first announced, vCloud Hybrid Service was described as infrastructure-as-a-service that integrates directly with VMware environments. Customers running lots of applications in-house on VMware infrastructure can use the cloud to expand their capacity without buying new hardware and manage both their on-premises and off-premises deployments as one.

That's still the core of vCloud Hybrid Service—but in addition to the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service, VMware will also have a desktops-as-a-service offering, letting businesses deploy virtual desktops to employees without needing any new hardware in their own data centers. There will also be disaster recovery-as-a-service, letting customers automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service instead of their own data centers. Finally, support for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry and Pivotal's deployment of Cloud Foundry will let customers run a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in vCloud Hybrid Service. Unlike IaaS, PaaS tends to be optimized for building and hosting applications without having to manage operating systems and virtual computing infrastructure.

While the core IaaS service and connections to on-premises deployments will be generally available in September, the other services aren't quite ready. Both disaster recovery and desktops-as-a-service will enter beta in the fourth quarter of this year. Support for Cloud Foundry will also be available in the fourth quarter. Pricing information for vCloud Hybrid Service is available on VMware's site. More details on how it works are available in our previous coverage.

Competitive against multiple clouds

All of this gives VMware a compelling alternative to Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon is still the clear leader in infrastructure-as-a-service and likely will be for the foreseeable future. However, VMware's IaaS will be useful to customers who rely heavily on VMware internally and want a consistent management environment on-premises and in the cloud.

VMware and Microsoft have similar approaches, offering a virtualization platform as well as a public cloud (Windows Azure in Microsoft's case) that integrates with customers' on-premises deployments. By wrapping Cloud Foundry into vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware combines IaaS and PaaS into a single cloud service just as Microsoft does.

VMware is going beyond Microsoft by also offering desktops-as-a-service. We don't have a ton of detail here, but it will be an extension of VMware's pre-existing virtual desktop products that let customers host desktop images in their data centers and give employees remote access to them. With "VMware Horizon View Desktop-as-a-Service," customers will be able to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure either in-house or on the VMware cloud and manage it all together. VMware's hybrid cloud head honcho, Bill Fathers, said much of the work of adding and configuring new users will be taken care of automatically.

The disaster recovery-as-a-service builds on VMware's Site Recovery Manager, letting customers see the public cloud as a recovery destination along with their own data centers.

"The disaster recovery use case is something we want to really dominate as a market opportunity," Fathers said in a press conference today. At first, it will focus on using "existing replication capabilities to replicate into the vCloud Hybrid Service. Going forward, VMware will try to provide increasing levels of automation and more flexibility in configuring different disaster recovery destinations," he said.

vCloud Hybrid Service will be hosted in VMware data centers in Las Vegas, NV, Sterling, VA, Santa Clara, CA, and Dallas, TX, as well as data centers operated by Savvis in New York and Chicago. Non-US data centers are expected to join the fun next year.

When asked if VMware will support movement of applications between vCloud Hybrid Service and other clouds, like Amazon's, Fathers said the core focus is ensuring compatibility between customers' existing VMware deployments and the VMware cloud. However, he said VMware is working with partners who "specialize in that level of abstraction" to allow portability of applications from VMware's cloud to others and vice versa. Naturally, VMware would really prefer it if you just use VMware software and nothing else.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

Well, as a user of remote desktop (what the original poster meant), once the round trip time goes over 50 ms, it becomes hard to use the machine. You click, but the mouse was still moving and you clicked the wrong thing, etc. At 200 ms it is "just give up and forget it" bad. Right now, I am on remote desktop from home and it is 22 ms to work for me. This works brilliantly. Slow it down much and it degrades rapidly.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

Well, as a user of remote desktop (what the original poster meant), once the round trip time goes over 50 ms, it becomes hard to use the machine. You click, but the mouse was still moving and you clicked the wrong thing, etc. At 200 ms it is "just give up and forget it" bad. Right now, I am on remote desktop from home and it is 22 ms to work for me. This works brilliantly. Slow it down much and it degrades rapidly.

It's not that bad. I've regularly worked with machines in China with well over 200ms ping times. With RDC it's really quite usable. Over VNC, not so much. I also use machines in Windows Azure, with fairly low ping times, and it's pretty much like RDCing into a machine in the same building as me.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

I spend most of my day logged into VM hosted in our datacenter. Ping time is a consistent 124ms. Response time for the UI is okay, with a very, very small noticeable lag. Also, some applications have exotic mouse gestures that are not well supported well via RDP.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

You're kidding right? Citrix desktop virtualization for my wife's company is an unbelievably piss poor experience. Maybe it's how the hosting company is configured, but if there is any sort of load you can kiss responsiveness goodbye.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

Well, as a user of remote desktop (what the original poster meant), once the round trip time goes over 50 ms, it becomes hard to use the machine. You click, but the mouse was still moving and you clicked the wrong thing, etc. At 200 ms it is "just give up and forget it" bad. Right now, I am on remote desktop from home and it is 22 ms to work for me. This works brilliantly. Slow it down much and it degrades rapidly.

Over 200ms successfully? You can thank your network guys for that: prioritizing, traffic shaping and Riverbeds, etc, at both ends are, I'm certain, making your experience acceptable. Without those technologies RDP, VNC, and even ICA fail miserably at over 200ms unless you're just doing a command line. And even that would be frustrating.

For games, latency does indeed matter (yes, quality does too) especially if you're playing on public or even private servers. Ever try shooting at someone in an FPS then miss while watching them magically teleport to another spot? Latency causes that.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

You're kidding right? Citrix desktop virtualization for my wife's company is an unbelievably piss poor experience. Maybe it's how the hosting company is configured, but if there is any sort of load you can kiss responsiveness goodbye.

I've done Citrix for a long time. Most companies fail to do it correctly and set up just enough to call it "up" and then try to simply stay above water. Citrix is a beast and can perform beautifully given a proper design.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

You're kidding right? Citrix desktop virtualization for my wife's company is an unbelievably piss poor experience. Maybe it's how the hosting company is configured, but if there is any sort of load you can kiss responsiveness goodbye.

I've seen the same with VMWare View. It's a question of resources and configuration.

If you take a server that is starved of RAM (and even lacks cores!) and put the result through a tiny pipe that does have no traffic management at all, the result is crap.If you have hundreds of people logging in repeatedly into non persistent machines and deploy tons of software through GPO, then have Outlook work in cached mode with GB sized mailboxes and the Windows Search indexing all of that in the background essentially all the time and have no optimizations on your XP image at all, the result is crap.

What often seems to be a misunderstanding about VDI is that you can save tons of money and just throw out the big boxes under the tables, while leaving everything else alone. This is the recipe for disaster.IME there's little money to save in infrastructure costs when you properly size your VDI hosts, buy proper thin clients and figure in the costs for good network connections, especially at remote sites.

If you do it right and put some effort into configuring the hosts, the images and the network, though, VDI can get good enough for the average user to never think about it. Until you tell them that they can log on in another room and have their open windows comes with them - or at a client's site or at home.

It's like almost everything in IT and life. A fool can break everything and make it look like crap.

"VMware is going beyond Microsoft by also offering desktops-as-a-service. We don't have a ton of detail here, but it will be an extension of VMware's pre-existing virtual desktop products that let customers host desktop images in their data centers and give employees remote access to them."

It seems that you didn't use Windows Azure. Microsoft has already been offering Virtual Desktops for more than 6 months with preconfigurations for SharePoint, Visual Studio, etc.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

This is not targeted towards games. At all. =)

But I regularly do a couple of remote desktop solutions over the Internet (one to a site about 1800 miles away, another to one 20 miles away but I have to go through at least 600 miles of network to get to =) and they're not bad. Not great, but not bad.

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

This is not targeted towards games. At all. =)

But I regularly do a couple of remote desktop solutions over the Internet (one to a site about 1800 miles away, another to one 20 miles away but I have to go through at least 600 miles of network to get to =) and they're not bad. Not great, but not bad.

Clicked the comments on this one just to see people bring up games. Hilarious.

I don't use this stuff (except for a few experiences with Maya/Mental Ray cloud rendering) but it's absolutely fascinating to me. This whole technological vanguard is really intriguing.

My problem (and it's my problem; nobody owes me anything in the way of a solution) is that, absent any hands-on experience, I have real trouble conceptualizing how all of this actually works. I read the Ars Technica "Primer" earlier this year and it helped out, but I still have trouble understanding exactly what's going on with all the user accounts and processes and instances of applications within instances of OSes flying around over the internet.

From what I've read, it seems like HyperVisors can literally swap processes away from stalled or failing CPU cores onto other cores in other machines without failure or interruption (and with trivial lag-time), even if those other machines are networked from miles away. A processor starts performing a function on a packet of data; the machine fails; and another processor in another building finishes the job. That's incredible to me.

The fact that virtual instances of OSes, applications, desktops, accounts, and processes can optimize so that a dozen machines can do the work of a hundred non-virtualized, old-school machines (or more!) makes my head spin. I can't even imagine the challenge of explaining all of this to non-technical people (who have enough trouble understanding SaaS environments and business networks even when they aren't virtualized).

While acknowledging that remote desktop latency is a real issue for many, it would seem that having a third competitor in the elastic computing space can only drive down rates for companies currently using Amazon or Microsoft to handle non-linear computing loads like interval based batch processing, seasonal loads, etc.

We've been trialling VMware Horizon, and when properly set up, actually works brilliantly. It's totally cross-platform from the client-side, so you can be doing your work on your Windows desktop in the office, then continue it at home on your Mac, and keep working on the train while you're commuting, using an iPad.

The cloud deployment option sounds great for businesses who are network-constrained. Our main office (and manufacturing plant) in Australia actually has no wired internet access at all. It's all point-to-point wireless because it's in an old industrial estate with shoddy telecommunications infrastructure. A cloud desktop deployment actually makes a whole lot of sense in that situation, as people working off-site could use the VDI deployment without being constrained by internet speeds into the office.

However, there's a huge gotcha that we're not really sure how to deal with... Microsoft VDA licensing. Based on discussions with Microsoft, the following caveats apply:

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

"VMware is going beyond Microsoft by also offering desktops-as-a-service. We don't have a ton of detail here, but it will be an extension of VMware's pre-existing virtual desktop products that let customers host desktop images in their data centers and give employees remote access to them."

It seems that you didn't use Windows Azure. Microsoft has already been offering Virtual Desktops for more than 6 months with preconfigurations for SharePoint, Visual Studio, etc.

I fail to see how "desktops as a service" by vmware trumps Remote Desktop Services". Its similar to the old Citrix vs Terminal Services all over again.

We've been trialling VMware Horizon, and when properly set up, actually works brilliantly. It's totally cross-platform from the client-side, so you can be doing your work on your Windows desktop in the office, then continue it at home on your Mac, and keep working on the train while you're commuting, using an iPad.

The cloud deployment option sounds great for businesses who are network-constrained. Our main office (and manufacturing plant) in Australia actually has no wired internet access at all. It's all point-to-point wireless because it's in an old industrial estate with shoddy telecommunications infrastructure. A cloud desktop deployment actually makes a whole lot of sense in that situation, as people working off-site could use the VDI deployment without being constrained by internet speeds into the office.

However, there's a huge gotcha that we're not really sure how to deal with... Microsoft VDA licensing. Based on discussions with Microsoft, the following caveats apply:

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

Why not use Per User licensing for Remote Desktop Services?? One license, many devices, less complications. I've never dabbled with VDI and your story does nothing to compel me to even spend time looking at it. I'm sure there's a reason, that's why I'm asking.

Clouds as a service are to businesses what rentals are to individuals. It's all about flexibly dealing with demand.

Or not typing up capital in purchases. Or not taking on the leverage risk or interest rate risk of debt in purchases.

This is why SA makes sense for us...we have the capital to buy what we need because we've always planned well. Normalize your costs, know what to budget for, always have access to the latest and greatest...support is included. And its already setup like a lease, except its interest *free* over 3 years. I think he's right about CaaS to biz what rentals are to individuals. If you over purchase you can drop your license renewal and if it happens to be after your 3rd year you own it anyway. If you keep going the price drops by a nice margin.

Why not use Per User licensing for Remote Desktop Services?? One license, many devices, less complications. I've never dabbled with VDI and your story does nothing to compel me to even spend time looking at it. I'm sure there's a reason, that's why I'm asking.

That's where we are at the moment, and that's where it looks like we'll be staying.

However, Horizon, and its deployment model, has a whole lot of technical advantages, for example:

Users aren't just accessing a shared server as a client. They have their own private VM, which they can do what they want with:

If they need local admin rights, they can be granted.

If they hose the VM, it can just be re-deployed in a few clicks.

If they fill up the server VM's HDD (which happens often for us when users incorrectly process lab data), it only affects them, rather than other users.

Application contention is eliminated. No more: "Sorry, this file is locked" errors.

Also, desktop versions of Windows can be deployed, rather than Server. This is an advantage for us, as we heavily use some scientific software that is unsupported on Windows Server, and just plain won't work at all over RDS.

However, the licensing is a total nightmare.

One thing we are considering is a loophole that allows you to implement Horizon using Server VMs on Windows Datacenter. That way, each user can still have their own dedicated VM, and we can just assign a single RDS CAL to each VM, instead of using VDA. However, this is clearly a loophole, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being closed.

At a surface level, vCHS may sound like an impressive feat for VMware. But, as I've drilled into the details, I've noticed the following concerning items:

- Cost - compared to Windows Azure, AWS and Rackspace, vCHS appears to be a pricey solution - as much as 1.5x - 2x the other cloud providers

- Availability - the vCHS SLA defines availability in an interesting way - network interfaces have to be down for 3 consecutive minutes, VMs for 5 consecutive minutes to be considered an SLA event. In addition, downtime caused by VMware planned maintenance, VMware bugs or viruses, hacking, major disasters are all excluded from the SLA

- Not really "Pay-as-you-go" like other cloud platforms - it appears that customers must pre-purchase reserved blocks of resources in advance, rather than paying only for what they need as they go. This eliminates a lot of the value of being an "as-needed" operational cost, vs large capital pre-purchases upfront in many cloud computing application scenarios

- Limited compliance certifications (today) - only ISP/IEC 27001 and SOC II Type 1 - hopefully this will be expanded to a broader offering to support the needs of other industries

- Largely an IaaS only offering, many of the expected cloud use cases, such as Web Hosting, Packaged Applications and Off-site Backups are generally handled more cost effectively via SaaS rather than IaaS

- Unclear PaaS vision with planned 3rd party integration of Cloud Foundry Open Source stack - how it will integrate into cost model is unclear, as a large part of the value of PaaS is through more cost-effective cloud resourcing than IaaS can provide.

- Datacenter expansion plans leveraging third party relationship with Savvis - this appears to be a third-party doing private label hosting of vCHS rather than truly part of a global cloud fabric like Azure and AWS. I will be interested to see how security, compliance, governance and management are applied to these third party locations.

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

So if you just bought your users a laptop, would it be cheaper, or more expensive than the cloud?

So if you just bought your users a laptop, would it be cheaper, or more expensive than the cloud?

Cloud deployment is really just an afterthought, and only suitable for particular use cases.

The whole point of the on-site VDI deployment is that we run a lot of lab software that needs access to high volumes of data. Most of it isn't client/server based. So, running the Desktop VMs off the SAN where that data is stored is going to give you the best possible performance.

Once we have that VDI infrastructure in place for the staff that need to do that data analysis (about a third of the staff with computer access), we may as well leverage the VDI system to simplify things for everyone else, and reduce our software administration complexity. However, most of that would be on-site hosted.

Cloud VDI starts to make sense for off-site users (particularly in overseas satellite offices) where access to physical machines for maintenance and troubleshooting is always problematic. We could just let them manage their own machine (i.e. BYOD or a minimal PC setup), and all company work would be done via Horizon.

However, all of that is hypothetical at this stage. The licensing implications mean we may well be better off just keeping on going with a mix of laptops, desktops and RDP.

We've been trialling VMware Horizon, and when properly set up, actually works brilliantly. It's totally cross-platform from the client-side, so you can be doing your work on your Windows desktop in the office, then continue it at home on your Mac, and keep working on the train while you're commuting, using an iPad.

The cloud deployment option sounds great for businesses who are network-constrained. Our main office (and manufacturing plant) in Australia actually has no wired internet access at all. It's all point-to-point wireless because it's in an old industrial estate with shoddy telecommunications infrastructure. A cloud desktop deployment actually makes a whole lot of sense in that situation, as people working off-site could use the VDI deployment without being constrained by internet speeds into the office.

However, there's a huge gotcha that we're not really sure how to deal with... Microsoft VDA licensing. Based on discussions with Microsoft, the following caveats apply:

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

I'm looking for a solution for a school that has to switch to Windows 8 by the end of the year and VDI looks like the best option for them. Like you, the byzantine Microsoft licensing may be the only showstopper. The scenario I'm looking at is buying Windows Professional OEM, upgrade or full for devices that don't have a Windows Pro license, then when all devices are Windows Professional get SA. So, if allowed, I'd slap a Windows Pro license onto a thin client and then get SA which is considerably cheaper over the long run than VDA. The real killer though is Office which you need to license for all devices using the software.

If your organization is any size, go talk with Microsoft directly. They're know to be flexible but you really want to have an agreement on paper just in case you get a visit from the BSA.

The scenario I'm looking at is buying Windows Professional OEM, upgrade or full for devices that don't have a Windows Pro license, then when all devices are Windows Professional get SA.

You can only by Software Assurance within 90 days of the original OEM Windows purchase. So if the machines are older than 90 days, you won't be able to get Software Assurance without re-licensing them with a retail or volume license.

We're in the situation where we have a lot of older OEM Windows and Office licenses. There's no clear way to get them onto SA, other than just relicensing everything Volume, which would be an expensive proposition.

Quote:

If your organization is any size, go talk with Microsoft directly.

We've been taking to them, and their advice has basically been: "Get VDA licenses for everything that will interact with Horizon. For tablets, we recommend you switch to Windows RT Surface tablets, which have VDA included".

"VMware is going beyond Microsoft by also offering desktops-as-a-service. We don't have a ton of detail here, but it will be an extension of VMware's pre-existing virtual desktop products that let customers host desktop images in their data centers and give employees remote access to them."

It seems that you didn't use Windows Azure. Microsoft has already been offering Virtual Desktops for more than 6 months with preconfigurations for SharePoint, Visual Studio, etc.

We've been trialling VMware Horizon, and when properly set up, actually works brilliantly. It's totally cross-platform from the client-side, so you can be doing your work on your Windows desktop in the office, then continue it at home on your Mac, and keep working on the train while you're commuting, using an iPad.

The cloud deployment option sounds great for businesses who are network-constrained. Our main office (and manufacturing plant) in Australia actually has no wired internet access at all. It's all point-to-point wireless because it's in an old industrial estate with shoddy telecommunications infrastructure. A cloud desktop deployment actually makes a whole lot of sense in that situation, as people working off-site could use the VDI deployment without being constrained by internet speeds into the office.

However, there's a huge gotcha that we're not really sure how to deal with... Microsoft VDA licensing. Based on discussions with Microsoft, the following caveats apply:

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

I'm looking for a solution for a school that has to switch to Windows 8 by the end of the year and VDI looks like the best option for them. Like you, the byzantine Microsoft licensing may be the only showstopper. The scenario I'm looking at is buying Windows Professional OEM, upgrade or full for devices that don't have a Windows Pro license, then when all devices are Windows Professional get SA. So, if allowed, I'd slap a Windows Pro license onto a thin client and then get SA which is considerably cheaper over the long run than VDA. The real killer though is Office which you need to license for all devices using the software.

If your organization is any size, go talk with Microsoft directly. They're know to be flexible but you really want to have an agreement on paper just in case you get a visit from the BSA.

You would surely qualify for education class licensing, which is a fraction of a fraction of the cost of business or retail licensing. I haven't seen the pricing in quite a while, but its somewhere around 10x cheaper.

Looks like they have a lot more focus than before. I'm sure DR will be a big win for them and their existing customer base.

Interesting choice of words, "focus." As a former VMware employee, they are much more focused now.

Yeah I thought about that too after I wrote it. On one side you have to offer every XaaS under the sun, and the other you have to realize no one else is going to offer your hypervisor. If you look at Azure it's the same story, they only focused on PaaS thinking everyone would write things from scratch, and only started attracting folks after they diversified their offering. But really it's both specialization and diversity reinforcing each other.

We've been trialling VMware Horizon, and when properly set up, actually works brilliantly. It's totally cross-platform from the client-side, so you can be doing your work on your Windows desktop in the office, then continue it at home on your Mac, and keep working on the train while you're commuting, using an iPad.

The cloud deployment option sounds great for businesses who are network-constrained. Our main office (and manufacturing plant) in Australia actually has no wired internet access at all. It's all point-to-point wireless because it's in an old industrial estate with shoddy telecommunications infrastructure. A cloud desktop deployment actually makes a whole lot of sense in that situation, as people working off-site could use the VDI deployment without being constrained by internet speeds into the office.

However, there's a huge gotcha that we're not really sure how to deal with... Microsoft VDA licensing. Based on discussions with Microsoft, the following caveats apply:

Home machines/devices are only exempt from VDA if the licensing has already been bought for the user's "primary" desktop, the home machine was not paid for by the company, and the home machine is never used on the corporate network.

iPads that are used both at work and at home require VDA licensing. If someone uses Horizon at both home and work on their personal iPad, then they need a VDA license for it.

That's all just for the OS. It gets more complex for applications.

In "BYOD" situations, where users end up bringing in their personal laptops and iPads to work, they will need VDA licenses for all of their devices used on the work network.

So, to make Horizon viable, we would need to:

Buy VDA licenses for all desktop users who want to use it.

Buy VDA licenses for all work-issued iPads for those users.

If they're crazy enough to want to use it on their smartphone, it will need a VDA license too.

They can use Horizon without VDA licensing at home, provided that machine is strictly never used on the corporate network (presumably VPNing in from home is OK).

If they have a personal laptop that they use at work sometimes (very common), then they will need a VDA license for that too.

It's all enough to give me a headache, and say: "Let's just not worry about this whole Horizon thing, it was meant to simplify deployment".

I'm looking for a solution for a school that has to switch to Windows 8 by the end of the year and VDI looks like the best option for them. Like you, the byzantine Microsoft licensing may be the only showstopper. The scenario I'm looking at is buying Windows Professional OEM, upgrade or full for devices that don't have a Windows Pro license, then when all devices are Windows Professional get SA. So, if allowed, I'd slap a Windows Pro license onto a thin client and then get SA which is considerably cheaper over the long run than VDA. The real killer though is Office which you need to license for all devices using the software.

If your organization is any size, go talk with Microsoft directly. They're know to be flexible but you really want to have an agreement on paper just in case you get a visit from the BSA.

O365 changes the per-device model. Not sure if it works for you, but O365 licensing changes to per-user, with 5 devices per user allowed (NO idea if this works for your endeavor). IANA Licensing specialist, and you may count this as genuine Internet Advice (tm).

What's usability/latency like on a remote desktop over the internet these days? Unless you're really close to one of their datacenters I'd think that lagging UI would be a problem.

Not really, if people are playing games as streaming...

In the case of games, the biggest issue is actual quality, not response time.

There is something called cache and buffering for that. Streaming software is not a problem since years.

I disagree. Latency on a virtualized Remote Desktop is paramount if utilizing GPU pass through. Nvidia's GRID can handle it but if you have a latency of over approximately 120ms your experience will suffer greatly.

I've seen the same with VMWare View. It's a question of resources and configuration.

If you take a server that is starved of RAM (and even lacks cores!) and put the result through a tiny pipe that does have no traffic management at all, the result is crap.If you have hundreds of people logging in repeatedly into non persistent machines and deploy tons of software through GPO, then have Outlook work in cached mode with GB sized mailboxes and the Windows Search indexing all of that in the background essentially all the time and have no optimizations on your XP image at all, the result is crap.

What often seems to be a misunderstanding about VDI is that you can save tons of money and just throw out the big boxes under the tables, while leaving everything else alone. This is the recipe for disaster.IME there's little money to save in infrastructure costs when you properly size your VDI hosts, buy proper thin clients and figure in the costs for good network connections, especially at remote sites.

If you do it right and put some effort into configuring the hosts, the images and the network, though, VDI can get good enough for the average user to never think about it. Until you tell them that they can log on in another room and have their open windows comes with them - or at a client's site or at home.

It's like almost everything in IT and life. A fool can break everything and make it look like crap.

I recently worked for a small company that fell into this trap. They were promised a world of improvement by a contractor moving from thick clients connected to dedicated servers in their equipment room to a VDI setup at a remote location.

The project was under way when I started with the company. I expressed concerns with the plan, voicing bandwidth issues, but was ignored. We got the hosts up and running on site, and things were mostly going smoothly. Then a few months later we moved the hosts to a data center a couple hundred miles away, along with the phone system. We then had 10 - 15 dual-monitor VDI connections, along with 7-12 concurrent VoIP calls, and all in house internet traffic running over a single T1. The boss had been assure his connection was good enough so he refused to believe it was the issue for a good while.

After months of pushing the issue he decided that upgrading to a better connection wasn't affordable. We went from rated in the top 10 in our small industry 10 years in a row, with the number 1 spot the previous year, to not even making the top 10 after this move. An improperly planned setup can seriously effect the quality of service you offer to your clients.

I ask because I work for a fortune 50 company, and I am tasked with rolling out this very setup, but with the added difficulty of providing a remote Desktop as a Service with 3D support (using RGS or HDX Pro on Citrix) across a WAN (Houston to Sunbury, Luanda to Perth .. that sort of thing).

I have a lot of questions for you ... it's cool tech, but so far ahead of the curve. It's very hard to find others in the same field out there. Hopefully you helped this (presumably small) company out.